I finally visited Risham Syed’s Destiny Fractured at the Newark Museum of Art in late May. I had missed the opening—travel, deadlines, the usual whirlwind—but I’m so glad I made it in time. Risham is a dear friend whose work I’ve admired for years. Her practice has always inspired me—not only as an artist and musician but as someone navigating the overlapping maps of Lahore and the world, interrogating colonial memory and contemporary dislocations. This exhibition was, in a word, extraordinary. It didn’t just speak to me—it unsettled, stirred, and stayed with me.
Risham has long been known for her intricate, layered reflections on history, space, and identity. But this show marked a deepening, a widening of scope. From the first step into the gallery, I felt like I had entered a conversation between worlds—between Lahore’s dust-filled skies and Newark’s industrial edges, between the colonial past and a climate-stricken present. The exhibition doesn’t impose that connection; it reveals it, slowly, gently, with the kind of care and confidence that only a seasoned artist like Risham can summon.
I was fortunate to walk through the exhibition with Atteqa Ali, the brilliant curator behind this project. Atteqa didn’t just explain the works—she opened up their silences, their contradictions. She guided me through the museum’s Victorian period rooms, Chinese scrolls, and industrial landscape collections that Risham had subtly intervened in through video, textile, painting, and assemblage. It became clear this wasn’t simply a show about Lahore or Newark, or even about colonialism or climate change—it was about the fragile, tangled ways in which our destinies are, in fact, shared.
